At a conference staged by the MyADSL website last week, one customer said he had recently contacted Sentech’s help desk by e-mail to find out the prices of various packages.

“Your quality control is very good because I had 21 calls checking that someone had actually called me,” the customer told the Sentech guest speaker. Sadly, however, not one of those calls was from a salesman who could actually answer the question.

Loser of the Year

AT THE same conference, MyADSL founder Rudolph Muller handed out awards to those who had helped to grow the telecommunications industry. He also dished out a booby prize for those who had done nothing but stifle it.

Based on votes by the internet community, the Independent Communications Authority of SA (Icasa) and Communications Minister Ivy Matsepe Casaburri were strong contenders, which proves that whatever good they think they are doing, the people who run the industry strongly disagree.

But of course it was Telkom that surged ahead to take the award in the end. The prize: an antiquated modem that downloads data at a sluggish 33,6kB per second.

Muller could not resist another sly dig as he named Telkom the Loser of the Year. Perhaps Telkom would fail to understand the irony of the ultra-slow modem and would issue a press release announcing that it had won another award, he quipped.

Discuss this article